Each of the controls included in the Telerik® UI for ASP.NET AJAX suite is styled with two CSS files that are loaded in a certain order. The first one – [ControlName].css , also called base stylesheet, contains CSS properties and values that are common for all skins, i.e it is layout-specific, not skin-specific. These are CSS float, padding, margin, font-size, font-family, etc. In the general case, when creating a custom skin for a control this file should not be edited, unless the custom skin needs different sizes, padding and / or margins.

The second file represents the actual skin of the control, and its name consists of the control name plus the skin name, e.g., - Button.Default.css. Upon creating a custom skin for the control, one should edit that particular file, as it contains skin-specific CSS properties, and references to images, colors, borders and backgrounds.

In the Skins folder if you already have some custom skin, most probably you have already a folder named: MyCustomSkin – if you don’t – create one;

In the Skins folder, create a new folder named: MyCustomSkinLite - this is the place where your Lightweight custom skins CSS will be placed;

Go to [ControlsInstallationFolder]\Skins\DefaultLite and copy Button.Default.css into your MyCustomSkinLite folder;

Go to [TelerikControlsInstallationFolder]\Skins\Default and copy the Common folder into your MyCustomSkin folder;

Rename Button.Default.css to Button.MyCustomSkin.css;

When you are finished you should have the following folder structure in your project:

Skins/MyCustomSkin/Common/ - containing several sprites;

Skins/MyCustomSkinLite/Button.MyCustomSkin.css.

In order to support multiple skins of RadLinkButton on a single page, the wrapping skin-specific class is created by the name of the control, plus underscore ("_") plus SkinName, i.e., .RadButton_Default, so in order to create a custom skin out of the Default skin, we should rename all occurrences of "RadButton_Default" in Button.MyCustomSkin.css to "RadButton_MyCustomSkin" as shown below:

Add a new server declaration of RadLinkButton on your page, and set Skin="MyCustomSkin" and EnableEmbeddedSkins="false":